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The Vixen R130Sf is a Newtonian reflector telescope that's an ideal beginner's instrument. It offers the excellent fit and finish you should expect from the Vixen brand, along with impressive light-gathering capacity for an introductory telescope. Its 5.1" diameter is large enough to do some serious deep sky, star cluster, and nebula observing. Vixen stands behind the economically-priced R130Sf with an impressive 5-year warranty.

A 650mm f/5 optical configuration is pretty bright in optical terms, besting most refractors, and offers impressively-wide viewing fields when coupled with longer focal length wide angle eyepieces. Newtonian telescopes have impressive resolution and color rendition in the viewing field's center, and the view gets progressively more distorted towards the edges-but it is often a good tradeoff, because you can get so much light-gathering capacity per dollar. Gathering light, after all, is a telescope's most important function. Viewing is contrasty and nice to observe.

For imaging purposes, the R130Sf's focuer barrel directly accepts a standard Vixen T-mount; just pick the T-mount for your SLR and away you go.

The R130Sf optical tube arrives with a 6x30 finderscope, a pair of Plössl eyepieces, tube rings, and a dovetail plate. The dovetail plate mates the tube rings together, and finally the scope/rings/dovetail is attached to any Vixen mount (Celestron's CG-5 and Meade's LXD75 also accept the dovetail plate, and the scope body's 1/4"-20 sockets can be used to affix to various other tripods or mounts).